Busted!

As much as I enjoyed the last game, there were a few niggling things to clear up about the look and feel of the game to get it to match what I imagine.

This is just the sort of thing that's in my head.
Photo lifted from Day of Battles FBook page, but according to Bob Cordery originally published in a Wargamer's Newsletter article about Gerard de Pre.

One of these was how to handle buildings. I spent some time playing with options for the ceramic and proposed new homemade buildings as well as whether or not 6" rather than 5" squares would help. I also broke out the little wooden houses.

Another was still a lingering wish that I could use each stand as a game piece. Things came to a head when I found myself writing and erasing rules for changing formation. The idea is that these sorts of details are being handled by Colonels and Brigadiers, not the General Officer Commanding, and should therefore be taken out of the player's hands. Failure to do their job being included amongst the unseen things represented by the dice. However, having 2 stand units brings a constant itch to play with unit formations.

Neither of these issues are new so I scrolled back through the archives looking at relevant posts.

This is the sort of look I'm actually after, but with bases full of close order troops rather than the small numbers of individual figures. From a game last February.

Two things quickly became apparent.

One is that while the little wooden buildings are a bit too small, the bigger ones, still under scale as they may be, change the feel of the board down towards a more grand skirmish game. I'm going to have to put nostalgia aside and make new, purpose built, towns and farms in order to get the "battle" look that I want.

A late 20th Century Colonial game from last May with each stand as a unit and multiple unts per square.

The other thing is that I've encountered the multiple units in a square issue before and now that I've been playing some non gridded, closer to original Morschauser Medieval games, I basically know how to handle the issue using based units where adjacent units can't get mixed up. Properly worded, the rules won't be hard to apply during a game, the difficulty is in writing, clear, concise, rules to describe how to do it. In other words, the real issue isn't that the game will be hard to play, just hard to write!

 In both cases, to get what I want is going to take some work from this lazy fellow!  I hear that's good for me though. Luckily the winter campaign season is close. We had our first dusting of snow yesterday.